I bought a MagicSee N5 Plus and I hadn’t tested it yet. Two days ago I decided to do this and initially I was disappointed, because nothing worked right, the performance was horrible and it crashed frequently.
So by coincidence I saw a comment on EmuELEC’s Discord that mentions the problems of overheating of the SoC’s S905X3 and how it can be solved by lowering the temperature.
Then I remembered that I had two fan coolers left over from building a computer, one 120mm and one 80mm…
With two stackable plastic baskets I mounted two supports for the box, placing the fans inside. One for the MagicSee N5 and one for the H96.
Replaces the box’s power supply with another 12 V and 2 A. I used a Y cable with P4 connectors to power both the tv box and the fan cooler, so I avoid using the box’s USB connection.
And the temperature of the N5 dropped from 73% to 52% and now it works great. Tomorrow I’ll check what happens with the H96.
I want to replace the heatsink on my A95X, but the heatsink seems very strongly stuck on, perhaps with thermal glue? Any ideas on how I could remove it without damaging anything?
Maybe consider trying to add to the existing heatsink rather than replacing it?
I mistakingly used thermal glue on my desktop CPU and have not found a means of detaching it, so if you do find a means, please post the method, as I need to replace the CPU.
The only method that worked for me is to twist it of. Start with small rotation left-right, slowly increasing force to achieve a little movement. When it starts moving a little keep on twisting. It will eventually come off, but be patient cause it takes some (long) time for glue to give up…
The best method to dissolve heat conductive glue should be to apply isopropanol to the sides, several times if necessary, between the heat sink and the IC package. However, I have not tried this myself yet.
I’m going to cut some holes into it at minimum. By removing the top I managed to reduce temperatures by 13 degrees celsius, really solid stuff.
update: I cut a bunch of holes into my case, managed to drop temps from 61C to 53C just with the added ventilation. Still would like to also replace the heatsink if possible though.
till now i planned to buy a X96Max+, but after reading this thread…
You spend a lot of time and work and for me most results, sorry for that, are not compatible with livingroom enviroment (exccept the solution from @kris007).
For me, i think about buying a Odroid N2+ - ok, not so cheap, but cool in thermal and design
What do you think about my decision?
It seems, that my friend has the same box, as you in this post. Friend’s box is dead, I think, the emmc is no more readable. Have you an android firmware for this box? I need the aml_sdc_burn.UBOOT from the original image. I downloaded many images, but nothing worked for me. Can you check the exact box name in Android please?
Odroid C4 is cheaper and has good thermal design. For a living room media player is just what you need. N2+ is more powerful and can be redeployed as media server or NAS.
Got a Vontar X4 (905X4) box last week and drilled holes in the top and sides to help with cooling, though I probably need to drill some more.
But one thing I’ve noticed is that temps seem more related to framerate than resolution. It’ll happily play a 3 hour 4k HDR movie @23.98fps with temps in the mid-50s. But switch to SDR @50fps and it edges up to 58C+. The worst is 1080i material @59.94fps. I did a test with a 1080i clip starting from ambient temp (just turned on, so low 20s), and after 30 minutes the temp was 71C (deinterlace mode shown as hardware). This correlated with the CPU load being displayed, which spiked up to 55% on one of the cores, though generally the max core load was around 35%.
So it seems that 1080i material is the best if you want to torture-test your cooling solution.
But it’s possible that CoreElec isn’t fully optimised for the 905X4 yet. So it would be interesting to know if you see a similar pattern in boxes with other SoCs.
I’m running the 20.1 ne stable build and can’t find any option in the settings to turn deinterlacing off. I now suspect that it’s deinterlacing that’s causing the temps to go up rather than raw framerate.
My previous tests were run with the GUI at 4k so Kodi does all the upscaling. I tried whitelisting 1080p29.97 and 1080p59.94 and the test clip was output at 1080p59.94 and reported as 1080p60 by the TV. Temps were unchanged from the previous test (i.e. around 70C after 30mins). Mediainfo confirms that the test clip (from a BluRay rip) is 1080i29.97.
Unfortunately all the SD interlaced test clips I can find are too short to be practical for a temperature test. But I’ll see if I can create one myself.
To skip Kodi deinterlacing just whitelist those resolutions, like 1080i. Since video layer is separate from UI layer, UI resolution does not matter. When you set UI to 1080 and play a 4k video, which is also whitelisted, video will be sent at 4k to TV.
i know the C4 is cheaper, but i like to buy a bit spare power for the future.
Since i have changed my sat>ip receiver from terratec (ugly) to Kathrine (very nice) i’m really happy with my setup - everything works as expected, fast and silent
Only thing you can hear is the 2.5" 1TB disk for my media files, but you have to put your ear against it.
